A rumored FaceTime iPad might run clever software that’ll analyze live video feed coming from its forward-facing camera. In so doing, it could recognize you in order to automatically apply your personalized settings.

The blogosphere lit up with the news that Apple may have gobbled up Polar Rose, a 15-person Swedish startup specializing in facial recognition technology. Norwegian website Mac1.no first broke the news and TechCrunch followed-up with a rumored $29 million transaction value. Neither company would confirm the deal, but Polar did shut down its face-tagging service a few weeks earlier because “larger companies” are interested in licensing its technology.

Polar Rose is behind various facial recognition-based technologies, including FaceCloud and FaceLib. The former is a face recognition platform in the cloud meant for high-volume services such as social networks. The latter enables facial recognition on low-powered platforms like smartphones.

They’re also behind the Recognizr app, demoed below, that detects folks on live video. You only need to snap the person and attach their social profiles. From there, just point a phone’s camera at this person and the matching social bubbles pop up, floating in the augmented-reality layer overlaid on top of live video.

Apple could use this tech in Mac OS X where you simply sit in front of an iSight-equipped Mac to log in to your account. Also, Polar’s software could replace Apple’s own facial recognition utilized in iPhoto and Apperture.

Christian’s Opinion

I’m putting my money on easy device sharing if the upcoming FaceTime iPad appears. You’d pick it up and it would recognize your face and automatically apply the corresponding profile. The device owner could create any number of accounts with pictures, potentially allowing a bunch of people to share a single iPad without messing up each other’s settings.

Do you think I’m fantasizing? I am, but a January Wall Street Journal piece claimed an early iPad prototype had this in place, allowing up to five family members to share the tablet. It disappeared from the shipping product, but the camera holes did not.